Читать книгу Sexuality in the Field of Vision - Jacqueline Rose - Страница 8

In her Tribute to Freud, the American woman poet H.D. writes of the one moment when Freud laid down the law during the brief analysis she conducted with him in 1933. This law (‘he does not lay down the law, only this once — only this one law’), coming from someone who still stands in the image of a patriarch with which feminism has not yet settled its accounts, was in fact no law, but a plea — a plea that H.D. should never defend Freud and his work ‘at any time, in any circumstance’. Freud goes on to explain this plea with the precision of ‘a lesson in geometry’ or of a demonstration of the ‘inevitable course of a disease once a virus has entered the system’.¹ A law which takes the form of a plea that there should be no defence, or which hovers between geometrical precision and the course of a disease — these are contradictions which we might expect from any discussion which has psychoanalysis as its object or which tries to place itself within its terms.

But there is something outrageous in Freud’s demand that psychoanalysis cannot be defended on the grounds that defence will ‘drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper’, since it snatches from the opponent the very rationality by which a critique, no less than a defence, of psychoanalysis should take place.² This disarming by Freud of his woman patient draws psychoanalysis back fiercely into its own practice and leaves her with an impasse which H.D. will then resolve — more or less and in her own way—through literary writing, memoirs and, finally, a tribute. A tribute, we could say, is one possible response, and perhaps the only possible response, to the laying down of the law.

On the other hand, Freud’s injunction and H.D.’s place within it reveal a dilemma or set of problems in which all the essays that follow are equally caught. First, the problem of writing of psychoanalysis in a context which exceeds its primary institutional and therapeutic domain. Second, the problem of writing in the form of a defence with regard to something — the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious — which brooks no defence and constantly breaks down the law. Third, the problem of writing as a woman within the terms and discourse largely of two men — Freud, and then the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who also saw his work as a tribute or return to Freud, as nothing less than the preservation of a ‘tradition entrusted to our keeping’.³ Scandalous for many other men of their time, they nonetheless embody the image of the patriarch whose insidious effects at the level of our psychic life they each attempted — with more or less success — to undo or defy.

The question which this introduction will attempt to address, therefore, is what could be the purchase of psychoanalysis outside its own specific domain. More specifically, the argument is for psychoanalysis in relation to feminism, and the importance of these together for the larger terms of contemporary political debate. We are in fact witnessing a moment when psychoanalysis is being assimilated into literary method—as it has been before — at the same time as the critique of psychoanalysis outside the academy by feminists and others is being renewed or increased. Feminism inherits and inflects a set of political challenges to psychoanalysis with a long and complex history which this introduction will also attempt to trace. The point being not to serve the essays themselves, but rather to situate them within an ongoing history and set of problems which I see them as part of today.

Two letters written by women at the time of Lacan’s dissolution of his school in 1980 confront each other on one page of the French radical newspaper Libération. Together they can give some sense of the struggles over institutions and power in which Lacanian psychoanalysis has been played out in France, and the place of the woman within it. The first, from Michèle Montrelay, states a refusal: to accept the dissolution of the école freudienne declared unilaterally by Lacan, to reaffiliate to his person. This refusal is a matter of love (‘what love is being demanded here?’) and its fantasies (‘in what Christlike position does Lacan thereby find himself placed?’), of the body and its powers (‘that massive body which becomes corpus and dogma, blindly putting itself at the service of a power which many would prefer to ignore’).⁴ The second, from Marie-Christine Hamon, sees, on the other hand, the dissolution of the school not as a ‘seizure of power’ or as a sign of ‘dogmatic intolerance’, but rather as the only way of reintroducing the ‘dimension of risk which is proper to discourse’⁵ against the transformation of Lacan’s theory into style (Lacanianism no less) and that view, which has been so influential outside of France under the brief of ‘New French Feminisms’, which sees theory itself as a masculine fantasy to which the only response for many women is the dissolution, not just of institutions, but of language itself.

For both writers, however, and despite the different personal decisions to which they individually came, the issue of institutional power is one in which the question of language and its limits is centrally at stake. ‘On n’est fou que de sens’ (‘Only meaning drives you mad’ or ‘No madness without meaning’), writes Montrelay⁶ — the unconscious is the only defence against a language frozen into pure, fixed or institutionalised meaning, and what we call sexuality, in its capacity to unsettle the subject, is a break against the intolerable limits of common sense.

François Roustang has described the way that this problem — how to create an institution in which the effects of the unconscious can be spoken without fossilizing into hereditary transmission and style — has marked the whole history of the psychoanalytic movement.⁷ In this case, however, it is clear that the question of the unconscious brings with it fantasies and images of sexual difference. Above all it leads to a question: how to situate oneself as a woman between the Christlike figure with its powerful and oppressive weight, and the too easy assimilation of the underside of language to an archaic femininity gone wild. That there is another scene to the language through which we most normatively identify and recognise ourselves is the basic tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis. But it is rarely demonstrated with such startling clarity how far the effects of the unconscious are tied into the key fantasies operating at the heart of institutions, and how these in turn are linked into the most fundamental images of sexual difference (adoration to the male, chaos or exclusion to the female) on which the wider culture so centrally turns.

The crisis of the analytic institution therefore leads outside itself and also outside the figure of Lacan. Montrelay herself stresses that her critique is addressed neither to his ‘person’ nor his ‘teaching’, although we can notice the strange similarity-cum-difference between Freud’s plea to H.D. and Lacan’s to his members: the end of all defence and the demise of a school, both of which hold within them the ultimate and most impossible of commands. Yet more importantly, this moment suggests that the question of how an institution defines its limits, or even constitutes itself as an institution, is underpinned by a realm in which sexual fantasy is at play. The interface between these two factors — of institutions and their fantasies — shows the fully social import of the concept of the unconscious, but the disagreement between these two women writers also suggests that the ramifications are not adequately covered, or cannot easily be settled, by recourse to any one-sided concept of power. For if the power clearly goes first to Lacan, and through him to Freud, it is also the case that Lacan’s dissolution of his school has led to a proliferation of analytic schools in France, which endlessly divide the name and image of Lacan to which many of them also claim allegiance.

The political import and difficulty of psychoanalysis can, I think, be read out of this moment. In terms of Lacan himself, the history begins with his critique of American ego-psychology, the assimilation, as he saw it, of the concept of the unconscious into a normative or adaptive psychology which took identity at its word and tried to strengthen it. But behind that lies the divisions of the analytic community in France and Lacan’s dissociation in 1953 from the Société psychanalytique de Paris because (amongst other reasons) of the autocratic way it was being governed. The critique of autocracy and the critique of the ego should be taken together, since an ego in place which has held off the challenge from the unconscious, or transformed it into something which can simply be known and controlled, will be autocratic above all else. For women especially, the supremest of autocrats is a father whose status goes without question and beyond which there is no appeal. Feminism describes this structure as patriarchal. It is no coincidence therefore that Lacan’s attempts to undo the effects of autocracy inside the analytic institution, and their hideous return, should have brought into such sharp relief his own symbolic status and the crisis for women of their relationship to it.

For someone like Montrelay, however, the only way to deal with that crisis is to continue to be an analyst, that is, to continue to create a space in which the problem of identification and its laws, in all their force and impossibility, can repeatedly be experienced.

The question of identity — how it is constituted and maintained — is, therefore, the central issue through which psychoanalysis enters the political field. This is one reason why Lacanian psychoanalysis came into English intellectual life, via Althusser’s concept of ideology, through the two paths of feminism and the analysis of film (a fact often used to discredit all three). Feminism because the issue of how individuals recognise themselves as male or female, the demand that they do so, seems to stand in such fundamental relation to the forms of inequality and subordination which it is feminism’s objective to change. Film because its power as an ideological apparatus rests on the mechanisms of identification and sexual fantasy which we all seem to participate in, but which — outside the cinema — are, for the most part, only ever admitted on the couch. If ideology is effective, it is because it works at the most rudimentary levels of psychic identity and the drives. As early as 1935, Otto Fenichel saw this as the chief contribution which psychoanalysis had to make to political analysis:

The study of the modifications of instinct is in no way an unessential bagatelle, but is of the greatest importance theoretically as well as practically. The statement that the production and dissemination of the ideology of a society must be understood from the actual economic conditions of this society, the ‘superstructure’ of which is the ideology; that further they are to be understood from the fact that this ‘superstructure’ by means of the actions of human beings, reacts back again upon the ‘foundation’, the economic conditions modifying them — these statements are correct but general. They become more specific when we succeed in comprehending scientifically the details of the mechanisms of these transformations, and only psychoanalysis is able to help us in that.⁸

Fenichel’s objective was a form of analysis which would understand the psychic force of ideological process while avoiding the twin pitfalls of sociological and psychological reductionism—the sociologists dismissing the psychic investments of social life as ‘mere bagatelle’, the psychoanalysts, as he saw it, falling into an equivalent trap which makes the realm of the psychic the primary determining factor in the social mechanisms which it serves to drive (Fenichel on Glover: ‘all psychological factors which partake of war he treats as the cause of war’; and on money: ‘nothing justifies the assertion that its symbolic significance is the cause of the origin of money’⁹).

But this objective of Fenichel’s, to use psychoanalysis in order to understand the internalisation, effectivity and persistence of some of the most oppressive social norms is striking for the way that it anticipates, in the similarity of terms, the argument with which Juliet Mitchell introduced the case for psychoanalysis and feminism in 1974:

The way we live as ‘ideas’ the necessary laws of human society is not so much conscious as unconscious — the particular task of psychoanalysis is to decipher how we acquire our heritage of the ideas and laws of human society within the unconscious mind, or, to put it another way, the unconscious mind is the way we acquire these laws … where Marxist theory explains the historical and economic situation, psychoanalysis, in conjunction with the notions of ideology already gained by dialectical materialism, is the way into understanding ideology and sexuality.¹⁰

The feminist move was, accordingly, to add sexuality to the historically established links between psychoanalysis and the understanding of how ideology works. It was in this context that sexual difference was analysed as one of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental, of human laws. This was therefore a theoretical case for a political necessity: that sexual difference should be acknowledged in the fullest range of its effects and then privileged in political understanding and debate. By presenting this case through psychoanalysis, Juliet Mitchell was not, however, only arguing for the importance of psychoanalysis for feminism. She was equally inserting the question of femininity back into a project which, as long ago as the 1930s, had seen psychoanalysis as the only means of explaining the exact mechanisms whereby ideological processes are transformed, via individual subjects, into human actions and beliefs.

Like Marxism, psychoanalysis sees the mechanisms which produce those transformations as determinant, but also as leaving something in excess. If psychoanalysis can give an account of how women experience the path to femininity, it also insists, through the concept of the unconscious, that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is it ever complete. The political case for psychoanalysis rests on these two insights together — otherwise it would be indistinguishable from a functionalist account of the internalisation of norms. In fact the argument from a biological pre-given and the argument from sociological role have in common the image of utter passivity they produce: the woman receives her natural destiny or else is marked over by an equally ineluctable social world.

The difficulty is to pull psychoanalysis in the direction of both of these insights — towards a recognition of the fully social constitution of identity and norms, and then back again to that point of tension between ego and unconscious where they are endlessly remodelled and endlessly break. In the 1930s, neither the celebration of the unconscious as pure force (Wilhelm Reich), nor the accusation of the restrictiveness of culture which forgets or would ideally abandon the unconscious altogether (culturalists such as Karen Horney) were adequate to that dynamic. The problem at that time was as it still is: how to articulate the unconscious as a point of resistance or defence without filling it out with visions of psychic and/or social utopia, whether one calls this unbound genital energy as Reich did then, or another femininity — site of an absolute or uncontaminated truth — as we are sometimes tempted to do now. The alternate discarding and reification of the unconscious has been the constant refrain (curse almost) of the Freudian left.

The feminist debate about psychoanalysis is therefore a repetition with a significant difference. We know now that the radical feminist critique of Freud’s phallocentrism was anticipated by the quarrels of the 1920s and 30s when analysts such as Jones, Horney and Klein objected to Freud’s account of sexual difference because of a fundamental asymmetry which was seen to work to the actual, as well as theoretical, disadvantage of the female. Turning that objection around, Juliet Mitchell could argue that asymmetry at the level of psychic life was precisely what psychoanalysis could be used to explain. But this quarrel should also be referred outside itself to the discussion of the political import of the Freudian concept of the unconscious and the sexual drive simultaneously conducted by analysts like Otto Fenichel and his group. Looking back at this moment, it is rather as if the theoretical/clinical debate about female sexuality and the more explicitly Marxist debate about ideology and its forms were historically severed from each other — at least until feminism itself forged, or rather demonstrated, the links.

Thus in the 1930s, the controversy over Freud’s account of femininity (roughly the division between the London and Vienna schools) was paralleled by the simultaneous controversy over the political import of psychoanalysis (again roughly the division between Vienna and Berlin).¹¹ The objective of Fenichel and the Berlin group was a political psychoanalysis which would use Freudian insights into psychic processes as the basis for a radical social critique — an issue never broached in the debate over femininity which was then simultaneously taking place. The Berlin group was in no sense simply opposed to Vienna, which had been the site of Reich’s own seminars in the thirties, but their Marxism distinguished them as a group. At the same time their commitment to the basic psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious and the sexual drive was constant, and this cut them off from the psychic utopianism of the better known Freudian left, whose simplistic notion of libidinal repression collapsed the concept of unconscious psychic conflict into that of cultural malaise.

In this debate we can see the deployment of all the terms within which the political controversy about psychoanalysis continues to be played out to this day. Fenichel himself was clearly caught between the theorisation of the unconscious and sexuality in all their complex difficulty on the one hand, and the need to give an account of the repressiveness of social norms on the other. The uniqueness of his position (one which is wholly travestied by the idea that he was simply put down or repressed)¹² is the fact that he refused to go over to either side. Which meant that the account of social constraint was always matched by a recognition of the perverse and aberrant nature of the sexual forces bound over into the oppressive and unjust services of social forms.

For historically, whenever the political argument is made for psychoanalysis, this dynamic is polarised into a crude opposition between inside and outside — a radical Freudianism always having to argue that the social produces the misery of the psychic in a one-way process, which utterly divests the psychic of its own mechanisms and drives. Each time the psychoanalytic description of internal conflict and psychic division is referred to its social conditions, the latter absorb the former, and the unconscious shifts — in that same moment—from the site of a division into the vision of an ideal unity to come. As if the tension between the unconscious and the image to which we cling of ourselves as unified subjects were split off from each other, and the second were idealised and then projected forward into historical time. Thus sexual radicalism seems to construct its image of a free sexuality in the image of the ego, without flaw or error, as the pre-condition, or ultimate object, of revolutionary change. Idealisation of the unconscous and externalisation of the event have gone together in the attempt to construct a political Freud. That this is a dualism — psychic or philosophical or indeed both — in the classic sense is clear from the way that the argument constantly crystallises into the inside/outside distinction.

It seems that from the outset, this issue has been at the heart of the earlier political, but also the feminist, critique of Freud. Reich’s rejection of the death drive, for instance,, is expressed in exactly these terms: “He [Freud] sensed something in the human organism which was deadly. But he thought in terms of instinct. So he hit upon the term ‘death instinct’. That was wrong. ‘Death’ was right. ‘Instinct’ was wrong. Because it’s not something that the organism wants. It’s something that happens to the organism.”¹³

And when, later, Habermas describes the unconscious as an interrupted communication between subject and self, he too makes of it the mere repository of ‘socially unsanctioned needs’, a type of interference with what would otherwise be the perfect self-communication and self-knowledge of subjects.¹⁴ The unconscious as the distorted effect of an oppressive social world — this was also the basis of the radical feminist critique of Freud which unilaterally shifted the emphasis from the subjectivity of the infant in the throes of unmanageable queries, envies and demands, onto the social institution of the family within which they are played out. Which is not to argue for a reversal of this dogma and grant primacy to the psychic, which would leave social misery or inequality as its simple effect, but to notice the strain on and of psychoanalytic theory in its attempt to describe in a non-reductive way the vicissitudes of psychic and sexual life.

In relation to psychoanalysis, feminism therefore finds itself with a dual inheritance: the quarrel over femininity in the thirties, but equally important, the terms of what was already then the more explicitly political debate. Read ‘ideology’ as ‘femininity’, ‘cultural norms’ as ‘the family’ and you produce the position of Shulamith Firestone, for whom psychic conflict — the problem of female identity — is the direct reflection of institutionally regulated forms of control (the link runs historically as well as theoretically from both the culturalists and the radical Freud).¹⁵ Add the question of femininity to Fenichel’s concern to insist, against this reduction, on the importance of the unconscious and sexuality to any political psychoanalysis, and you have the precise intervention for feminism made by Juliet Mitchell in 1974. The dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism is prefigured in this earlier, and still unresolved, debate. When someone like Elizabeth Wilson objects to any consideration of sexuality which cannot be mapped directly onto the immediately observable forms of gender inequality and oppression, her argument merely unwittingly repeats a historical and theoretical tension one half of which it blithely presents as a contemporary political fact.¹⁶

The same tension might explain the constant side-stepping of psychoanalysis and feminism in their mutual relation within recent Marxist debate. Thus Perry Anderson dismisses the feminist turn to Freud as a ‘precarious resort to less scientific bodies of thought [than socialism]’; Fredric Jameson overlooks the links between psychoanalysis and feminism in a book devoted to the place of the unconscious in cultural form (although radical feminism is recognised, it is later re-absorbed into a priority of class division and the category of the subject is dismissed as ‘anarchic’); Terry Eagleton about turns at the end of Literary Theory, and posits socialism and feminism over and above the forms of analysis, including psychoanalysis, he has covered in the book.¹⁷ In Jameson’s case, psychoanalysis returns in a footnote via Reich as a possible path to the analysis of the collective fantasies of religion, nationalism and fascism. In Anderson’s case, the moral-aesthetic utopias of the Frankfurt school, and in particular Habermas, appear — once psychoanalysis has been divested of its feminist interest — as the political end-point of the book. As indeed they do for Eagleton at the close of his chapter on psychoanalysis and the literary text.¹⁸ What is at issue here is not the political impetus of these books, but something which looks like a conspicuous omission or marginalisation of a crucial political link. And it seems to come in direct response to that moment when feminism brings the most fundamental problems of the psychic back onto the political agenda. It is as if feminism can be acknowledged as part of a critique of Marxism, and psychoanalysis can be incorporated into an account of collective fantasy, but they cannot be taken together. For then the concept of psychic life which accompanies the feminist challenge to sexual division presents itself too starkly against the terms of a traditional political critique. The unconscious as ideology (its present oppressiveness), or as pleasure (its future emancipation), but not something which hovers uncomfortably in between. This was the problem in the thirties as it re-presents itself to Marxism, and also feminism, today.

The most recent form taken by the polarity between inside and outside is the dispute which has broken out over Jeffrey Masson’s assault on Freud for relinquishing the seduction theory of neurosis in favour of the analysis of fantasy life.¹⁹ Seen in these terms, it might lose something of the originality and drama which it claims for itself. A radical feminist issue (not just because Masson now chooses to describe himself as such), this polemic states more clearly than any other that the concept of an internal psychic dynamic is detrimental to politics — in this case explicitly feminism — since it denies to women an unequivocal accusation of the real. There must be no internal conflict, no desire and no dialogue; conflict must be external, the event must be wholly outside, if women are to have a legitimate voice. The psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious becomes a male conspiracy which takes from women the truth value of their speech. Kate Millett puts the argument better than Masson in the Barnard anthology on sexual politics:

Reich was the first to address the sexuality of the young in an age when Freud was analysing and curing young persons with sexual disorders on order and payment from their parents. Freud often dealt with children, especially females, who had been sexually abused; he resolved the entire problem by deciding that it was an Oedipal fantasy on their part. So female children were not only sexually abused, they had to assent that they imagined it. This process undermines sanity, since if what takes place isn’t real but imaginary, then you are at fault: you are illogical, as well as naughty, to have imagined an unimaginable act: incest. You ascribed guilt to your father, and you are also a very guilty, sexy little creature yourself. So much for you.²⁰

Freud in fact never treated children, and the only child he had access to analytically — even indirectly — was male. But more important is the way that the idea of a conflictual, divided subjectivity, caught up in the register of fantasy, is directly opposed to the idea of legitimate protest as it is politically understood. The debate about political causality and the real event resolves itself into the issue of language. Political truth relies, therefore, on the concept of full speech. This throws slips and symptoms alike back into the outer darkness of aberration from which the Freudian attention to fantasy and the unconscious had originally served to rescue them.

The psychoanalytic attention to fantasy does not, however, discredit the utterance of the patient. To argue that Freud dismissed the traumas of his patients as ‘the fantasies of hysterical women who invented stories and told lies’ is a total misconstrual of the status psychoanalysis accords to fantasy, which was never assigned by Freud to the category of wilful untruth.²¹ In fact Freud’s move was the reverse — towards a dimension of reality all the more important for the subject because it goes way beyond anything that can, or needs to be, attested as fact. By seeing fantasy as a degradation of speech, by turning reality into nothing more than what can be empirically established as the case, it is Masson himself who places human subjects in the dock.

What can this discarding of the concept of fantasy make, for instance, of one of Masson’s own examples — the case of a twenty-nine-year-old woman who has sexual fantasies to the point of hallucination about her three-year-old nephew and who compulsively seeks reassurance from those around her that the event has not taken place? This example — in which desire belongs to the woman in relation to a male child and where what does not happen is hallucinated as if it had—is offered by Masson, without a trace of irony, as evidence that sexual impulses ‘which often lead to sexual acts’ on the part of adults towards children were ‘real’.²² Doesn’t this very example illustrate the vexed relation between actuality, memory, and fantasy which is the domain of the Freudian unconscious? And if we use this example to insist on the reality of seduction, where does that leave the woman if not simply accused, when her far more painful reality leaves her suspended between fantasy and the reality of the event? And again what should we make of the tension between Masson’s unequivocal appeal to ‘an actual world of sadness, misery and cruelty’ and his own recognition of a ‘need to repeat early sorrows’ which he recognises in his conclusion as one of the most genuine discoveries of Freud?²³

Fantasy and the compulsion to repeat — these appear as the concepts against which the idea of a more fully political objection to injustice constantly stalls. It seems to me that this is the ground on to which the feminist debate about psychoanalysis has now moved; but in doing so it has merely underlined a more general problem for political analysis which has always been present in the radical readings of Freud. Which is how to reconcile the problem of subjectivity which assigns activity (but not guilt), fantasy (but not error), conflict (but not stupidity) to individual subjects — in this case women — with a form of analysis which can also recognise the force of structures in urgent need of social change?

I would argue that the importance of psychoanalysis is precisely the way that it throws into crisis the dichotomy on which the appeal to the reality of the event (amongst others) clearly rests. Perhaps for women it is of particular importance that we find a language which allows us to recognise our part in intolerable structures — but in a way which renders us neither the pure victims nor the sole agents of our distress. In its strange attention to an involvement in a structure (say, sexual difference) no more reducible to false consciousness or complicity than to adaptation or ease, psychoanalysis might in fact allow us to rethink this vexed political question.

Let’s turn the critique of psychoanalysis around for a moment and say, not that the concept of a divided subjectivity is incompatible with political analysis and demand, but that feminism, through its foregrounding of sexuality (site of fantasies, impasses, conflict and desire) and of sexual difference (the structure towards which all of this constantly tends but against which it just as constantly breaks) is in a privileged position to challenge the dualities (inside/outside, victim/aggressor, real event/fantasy, and even good/evil) upon which so much traditional political analysis has so often relied. For it remains the case that — without reifying the idea of a pure fragmentation which would be as futile as it would be psychically unmanageable for the subject — only the concept of a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an impasse at the point of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible or future integration into a norm. Which is why someone like Habermas, coming from a very different position, who looks to psychoanalysis to solve the problem of how a class comes to knowledge of itself, and hence as a means to the pure rationality of the integrated political subject, so utterly misses the point.

It does seem to me, however, that it is precisely because of what psychoanalysis throws into question at just this level that feminism too, which has centred sexuality on the political stage, often about turns on psychoanalysis when faced with the twists and vicissitudes which psychoanalysis exposes at the heart of sexuality itself. Today the terms of the objections have shifted from the critique of phallocentrism to the argument that feminism needs access to an integrated subjectivity more than its demise.²⁴ Or else it takes the form of a new asserted politics of sexuality in all its multiplicity, but one from which any idea of the psychic as an area of difficulty has been dropped.²⁵

In all of this, what is worth noting is the strange relationship of psychoanalysis to the changing terms of feminist analysis and debate. Thus feminism asks psychoanalysis for an account of how ideologies are imposed upon subjects and how female identity is acquired, only to find that the concepts of fantasy and the unconscious rule any notion of pure imposition or full acquisition out of bounds. Or more recently, as feminism turns to the practices and limits of sexuality, calling for a pluralism which the analytic concept of a multifarious sexual disposition might appear to legitimate or support, it finds itself up against the problem of any sexual identity for the subject and the lie of any simple assertion of self. Perhaps even more difficult, as feminism turns to questions of censorship, violence and sado-masochism, psychoanalysis hands back to it a fundamental violence of the psychic realm — hands back to it, therefore, nothing less than the difficulty of sexuality itself.

For if psychic life has its own violence; if there is an aggression in the very movement of the drives; if sexual difference, because of the forcing it requires, leaves the subject divided against the sexual other as well as herself or himself; if the earliest instances of female sexuality contain a difficulty not solely explicable in terms of the violent repudiation with which the little girl leaves them behind — if any of these statements have any force (they can be attributed respectively, if loosely, to Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva), then there can be no analysis for women which sees violence solely as accident, imposition or external event. Only a rigid dualism pits fantasy against the real; only an attempt to reduce the difference between them by making one a pure reflection of the other has, finally, to set them so totally apart.

Thus feminism inherits the debates of the 1920s and 30s, not even in two, but in three stages. First the quarrel over sexual difference (the dispute over the phallocentrism of Freud); then the concept of ideology (femininity as a norm); and now the concept of the death drive which was no less controversial than the other two. For the debates over the real event and the limits of what is tolerable in sexual life, clearly contain within them this question of how, or where, violence should be placed. ‘Where does the misery come from?’ — this was the question put by Reich to Freud when he rejected the concept of the death drive, which has been the point at which more than one radical Freudian has broken with psychoanalysis.²⁶ Fenichel also criticised the concept precisely for the way it could be misused to ‘eliminate the social factor from the etiology of the neuroses’, but in the rest of this same paper, although these points are rarely quoted, he argues for the destructive character of the earliest psychic impulses and, against the dualism inherent in Freud’s own conception, posits Nirvana as a general principle of instinctual life.²⁷ If this is important today, it is only because we seem to be gravitating to a point where that same break with psychoanalysis is taking place. Thus sexual violence enters the political scene for reasons which go way beyond psychoanalysis (sexual politics in the immediate sense), only to find itself drawn once again into the confrontation with Freud. In response to which, violence is relegated wholly to the outside. But at that same moment — and with an almost moral distaste — it is the psychic dynamic of sexuality per se which is discarded.

At the same time, in this overall clash between psychoanalysis and a politics of sexuality based on assertion and will, the historical and national differences between the different emphases is important. The different feminist responses to, and uses of, Freud can only be properly understood in terms of the context in which they emerged. Thus the radical feminist rejection of Freud is in part a response to the analytic institution in America where, once the case for lay analysis was lost, then the ‘defeminisation’ no less than the depoliticisation of the analytic community was assured.²⁸ In France, on the other hand, the first links of Lacanian psychoanalysis were with avant-garde artistic practice and surrealism which guaranteed it a position of contestation in relation to bourgeois culture and norms, as well as at least partly explaining its attention to the slippages of language. Furthermore, its specific object of criticism was the very form of psychoanalysis which writers like Millett and Firestone were later to attack. In England, the feminist case comes through Marxism and the theory of ideology which connects with that much earlier radical Freudian project. If we take Montrelay, Mitchell and Millett, they can obviously be set against each other in the uses they make (or do not make) of Freud, but the attention to the play of language in all its dislocating effects, to the constraints of ideology, and to the politics of self-expression, identity and power, also point to crucial historical differences which should perhaps not be theoretically reduced to each other, and then resolved.

One strand of that institutional history and of the cross-currents between different cultures and politics should finally, if briefly, be mentioned. This is the recent assimilation of a literary Freud into the academic establishment. For while the feminist critique of psychoanalysis repeats itself outside, or even against, institution and academy, albeit in new terms, psychoanalysis is being incorporated into literary method, a strange relic of the link in France at least — for this is a French Freud — between psychoanalysis and the avant-garde text. Decisively informing a whole strand of artistic production in the visual image, photography and film, psychoanalysis simultaneously moves into literary analysis in conjunction with what is in fact a sustained and influential critique by Derrida of Lacan and, through him, of Freud.²⁹ Lacan himself always argued that only those who were alert to the processes of literary writing would understand his linguistic reading of Freud. But we need to ask what price this absorption of psychoanalysis — as practice and institution—into writing and reading has for the understanding of subjectivity and for feminism alike.

On the far side of the earlier critiques, this engagement with psychoanalysis aims for all those points in psychoanalytic discourse which reinforce the category of the subject, which Derrida sees as a vestige of the logocentrism of the West. Here the phallocentrism of Freud is objected to, not as a manifestation of male institutional power nor in the name of an identity of women, but in terms of the whole order of representation which supports it. One in which the phallic term receives its inscription at the level of a wholly general metaphysical law. Against that order of representation, Derrida posits différance, the sliding of language which only arbitrarily and repressively fixes into identity and reference alike. Différance is explicitly opposed to sexual difference in which Derrida identifies a classic binarism that closes off the potentially freer play of its terms.³⁰

This is a criticism which accordingly places itself at the opposite pole to the other political critiques, since where they see in psychoanalysis too little of a subject, Derrida sees if anything too much. But the two positions can be politically related — for while the first claims an identity rendered corrupt only through its exclusive possession by the male, the second goes for the same object by displacing or undercutting the form of identity itself. This is a traditional opposition between equality and difference as historical alternatives for feminism. Feminists have been attracted to Derrida’s reading precisely because of the possibility it seems to engender for a wholly other discursive and, by implication, political space.

But in so far as Derrida’s critique of psychoanalysis is part of a challenge to ‘the history of symbolic possibility in general,’ and through that to cultural form,³¹ it comes remarkably close at times to earlier radical repudiations of Freud. For Reich also criticised Freud for his commitment to the necessity of culture (‘Die Kultur geht vor’),³² and although différance is in no sense unbound genital energy, a reference to energy runs through Derrida’s writing.³³ For Derrida, that movement (that energy) is held down by a drive to mastery (‘la pulsion du propre’) which links the narcissistic and self-identified subject to the forms of propriety and propriation which characterise the logocentrism of the West. Likewise psychoanalysis is criticised as ethics and institution. In its strongest moments this is a criticism which points to the boundaries the analytic community sets for itself in relation to the political realities of the societies of which it forms a part.³⁴ But behind these more local designations, it is the concept of identity and subjectivity which is at stake. The analytic community draws in its boundaries protectively (remember Freud’s injunction to H.D.), and constitutes itself as an identity in that moment for which its ultimate reinforcement of the category of the subject is merely the logical sequel.

In Derrida there is therefore an endless dispersal of subjectivity. If it seems to go so much further than earlier criticisms in its disruption of categories and the transcending of norms, that is only because the scope of its critique is so much vaster (the phallogocentrism of the West). The dispersal of the subject across the space of representation then allows for the assimilation of this psychoanalysis into the literary/academic institution as a reading and writing effect (the bypassing of one institution leads straight into another).

For feminism, the critique of identity and difference has its obvious force — the production of what might be another representational space, and the resulting idea that sexual difference is not just internally unstable but can be moved off centre-stage, away from the privileged position which the psychoanalytic attention to the Oedipal moment undoubtedly accords it. Yet identity returns in Derrida through the category of mastery as the metaconceptual and transcendent drive, so that something in the order of a psychic exigency seems to underpin the logos itself. Behind the Western logos of presence, Derrida locates an archi-trace or différance which that logos would ideally forget, but this then requires a psychic account of how/why that forgetting takes place.³⁵ And sexual difference also returns with all the trappings of the binary polarisation which Derrida seeks to displace. For the effect of this general dispersal of subjectivity into a writing process where narrative, naming and propriation are undone, is the constant identification of the woman with the underside of truth. Precisely as a logical consequence of the ‘critique of humanism as phallogocentrism’, the woman comes to occupy the place ‘of a general critique of Western thought’³⁶ — at once the fantasy on which male propriation relies as well as the excluded fact of that propriation which gives back to it the lie. But the effect is a massive sexualisation of Derrida’s own discourse as the concepts of ‘hymen’ and ‘double chiasmatic invagination of the borders’ appear as the terms through which the failure of Western representation is most aptly embodied or thought.³⁷ The critique of the psychoanalytic focus on the Oedipal triangle and of the phallogocentrism of language can only be pursued, therefore, in terms of the very sexual antagonism which it was intended to displace. That the woman then comes to be set up in a classic position of otherness is only the most striking effect of this move.³⁸

An exposure of fantasy at the basis of language — or its mere repetition? (The question can also be asked of Lacan.) But thrown onto the underside of language, this fantasy cannot be analysed at the point of its psychic effectivity for subjects. It can only be played out, or discarded along with western discourse, perhaps.

Finally, if the challenge to subject, ethics and institution (psychoanalysis no less) leads to such a repetition, then we might also ask whether all or any of these can in fact be wholly displaced. Whether in fact only an institution that knows the necessity and impossibility of its own limits and, like the subject, can only operate on that edge, might be —instead of the antithesis of all politics — the pre-condition or site where any politics must take place. Suspended between the too little and too much of a subject, psychoanalysis can only be grasped — as practice and in its wider effects — from some such position as this.

For Derrida the critique of logocentrism leads to the end of the institution in which he rightly locates the oppressions of our world. But in going over to the other side he merely starts to repeat the sexual fantasmagoria which was there in the collapse of the école freudienne. And if we go back again to that moment, which is where I started, we find another woman analyst — Jeanne Favret Saada — who had resigned in 1977 over a colleague (also a woman) who had committed suicide after trying to make her way into full theoretical membership of the school through a procedure called ‘la passe’³⁹. Saada analyses the impossible transference which such a passage entails and resigns from the school, but she considers herself no less (rather more) of an analyst for that. The problem of the transmission of psychoanalysis and its ‘knowledge’ of the unconscious, she recognises, is not resolved by her gesture, any more than the ‘passe’ could be said in some simple way to have caused the death of her friend. Rather, as she sees it, it became the impossible repository of whatever was ‘unanalysed’ in her (Derrida’s ultimate question to the analytic institution is also that of its founding relation to the ‘unanalysed’ of Freud⁴⁰).

No recourse to a place simply outside the process of analysis, and no simple dichotomy between inside and outside. From Masson to Saada the question of how to locate the violence of institutions and of subjects returns as the issue of psychoanalysis in relation to the social today. In relation to Derrida, and for feminism, I would merely suggest that it is only the dispatching of the subject and its dissolution into a writing strategy which leads to the political demands for its return.⁴¹ For the political necessity of the subject is met in part by the psychic necessity of the subject, but in a way which finds itself suspended between each of these demands, for this subject is neither pure assertion nor play. More than writing, but less than the event, psychoanalysis continues to point to an instance which cannot be caught by the infinite play of language any more than it can be answered by class, economy or power. That has always been its political importance and its difficulty, although it is through feminism that this has been articulated more clearly than anywhere else. To understand subjectivity, sexual difference and fantasy in a way which neither entrenches the terms nor denies them still seems to me to be a crucial task for today. Not a luxury, but rather the key processes through which — as women and as men — we experience, and then question, our fully political fates.